Minding the Sun

Ecological tang rather than primordial soup characterizes Pack's latest offerings (after Inheritance and Fathering the Map), which fall into two distinct camps: poems that illustrate his love for nature (including the far reaches of the cosmos) and poems in which nature functions as the soul's field glass. Part One's 15-line lyrics are mainly mellow reveries on human loss, launched from ""The Place"" which suggests the poet's own Vermont back yard (""Here is the place-the house half hidden in dense pines"") and winding up with meditations on outer space. These are mostly poems about loss-of love, of energy, of will. In the next two sections, Pack draws away from an absence ""so palpable that I/ can taste it like ripe fruit upon my lips"" and starts having fun. His mischievous verses sometimes read like John Donne if Donne's Sierra Club membership dues were paid up. He handily draws ageless themes from subjects such as estrus, cockroaches and the Drake Equation, which estimates how many intelligent civilizations exist in the galaxy. While the whimsy yields occasional obscurantism and his reach becomes a stretch (the voice in ""Lament of the Male Gamete"" whines, ""I feel unprecedented pain/ in being cheated of the chance/ to make myself into a multitude""), the poems here are generally intelligent, deft and provocative. (May)